John Dunn

He knew there was something there, almost at the end of my school life. He would have rather been in the Thoor Ballylee writing poetry... but he was stuck with teaching, even though he was too good for it. He battled on despite nagging disappointment, always fierce and serious; but I felt newly confident and understood in his presence. He tried to coax life out of me, often hoping for responses to books that I had not properly read. Yet he knew there was something there, somewhere.

This Fenian had caught me at the time of first love, my love for Butterfly -when the tiniest of fissures in the Eros egg were allowing the faintes tof soul-light to pass through. It was late in the school year, but his influence helped me to engineer a life of the mind when just about everything else (the forest of much later realisation) conspired against this. I chose the lowest threshold option into university possible and just scraped together the qualifications to get there. I did it all myself. Something was driving me. I created space - space to read and think.

© John Dunn.